Bill would allow illegal immigrant students to qualify for tuition assistance for higher education

Young immigrants are flooding Gov. Cuomos phone lines and Twitter account, asking him to use his State of the State address Wednesday to call for tuition aid for undocumented immigrants.

The so-called New York State Dream Act, which has the backing of Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, would open the states Tuition Assistance Program to all college students, regardless of immigration status.

Jackson Heights teen Antonio Alarcon plans to make many calls and posts on @NYGovCuomo.

The governor should be focusing more on the Latino community, said Alarcon, 18, a student at LaGuardia Community College whose parents brought him to the U.S. illegally from Mexico at age 11. We are looking for TAP. It would give a lift, to get financial aid. ... We are expecting better things to happen this year.

A coalition of immigrant groups sent the governor a letter about the issue Monday.

Were really making a big push for it to be included, said Natalia Lopez, a youth advocate at non-profit Make the Road New York, which is hosting a Queens phone bank Tuesday.

The governors office did not immediately return a request for comment.

Undocumented immigrants qualify for state resident tuition for higher education  but they cant currently get state-backed financial aid.

The bill, introduced last year by Sen. Bill Perkins (D-Harlem) and Assemblyman Guillermo Linares (D-Washington Heights), would change that.

It has bipartisan support in the city, but has been criticized by some Republican lawmakers, who say it would wrongly reward illegal immigrants.

What's with this discrimination against natural born citizens with out of state tuition rates and other discriminatory policies? In state tuition rates and out state tuition rates are a relic that promotes illegal aliens over American citizens.

'Young immigrants illegal aliens are flooding Gov. Cuomos phone lines and Twitter account, asking him to use his State of the State address Wednesday to call for tuition aid for undocumented immigrants illegal aliens.'

“How come people who should have NO standing to pressure politicians are getting away with running roughshod over people who are here legally?”

Because they are doing it in “death spiral states” where they and their ilk are increasingly the only people who see any opportunity (albeit a tax-free one) there. They benefit from the increasing taxes on legitimate taxpayers, who in turn flee for greener pastures (deepening the spiral). Years ago our previous Dem governor here in NJ publicly admitted that NJ had lost population without factoring in illegal aliens (and we paid for it by losing an electoral vote); states with no people have no use for public employees (including politicians).

“Pretty soon, the term AMERICAN will be called hatespeech and we will be labeled a racist terrorist group.”

It already is (it is to “divisive”), and we already are: it is legal to discriminate against us in jobs and education because of the evil we have wrought.

I liked it during the campaign when libs said that “socialist” was the new “N” word; I’ve been using it as such ever since. Example: “I was accosted at the traffic light on McCarter Highway by a socialist panhandler”.

“This is exactly why I left New York. If you are a productive member of society, you are robbed to support parasites.”

It is draining the northeast of employers and employable people; so much is peed away in entitlements that little is left to maintain the infrastructure used by the people and companies who pay the taxes.

The New York metro area is going to be Detroit in the not so distant future. Perhaps, parts of Manhattan will remain attractive, but the rest of it is done for. I made the decision to move when it the point where over half my earnings were going to pay for parasites. There are loads of others making the same decision. You are absolutely right that the infrastructure will crumble. That’s what happened in Detroit and will happen in Queens, the Bronx, Hudson County, Essex County, etc.

It IS crumbling; there is no money left to repair the streets because of the costs still being paid for the guys who retired twenty years ago that used to fix them. NJ has laid off thousands of cops, teachers, firemen, and other municipal employees because we simply can’t afford them (thank you Governor Christie for the property tax cap - it saved many homes from foreclosure and families from financial ruin at the hands of the tax collector); those positions will never be re-hired, because the communities they serve have few taxpayers in them (NJ has a huge black market/underground economy, with a lot of illegal aliens).

Commissar Bloomberg and his ilk seem to think they can save Lower Manhattan with “congestion pricing” and tolls that make it difficult for us lesser people to travel there; at the same time, that area lost a lot of jobs to Asia that aren’t coming back. I understand the concept of the yuppie theme park, but the fact is that many of them have already fled to the NJ side of the river to escape his costs (and salt ban, and trans-fat ban, and big-gulp ban).

EXCERPT Remember the NAFTA Superhighway project? It was to consist of a two-mile wide $184 billion transit system of toll roads, rail lines and utilities from the Texas-Mexico border all the way up to the Minnesota-Canadian border, to make it easier to ship foreign goods from China and other countries into North America. It became so unpopular in Texas that the Texas portion of it, called the Trans-Texas Corridor, was renamed and mostly disbanded a couple of years ago. Perry was the only gubernatorial candidate in 2006 of four major candidates who supported it. Even the Democratic candidate opposed it.

Perrys campaign website lists the Trans-Texas Corridor as one of his accomplishments, Rather than taking decades to expand these important corridors a little bit at a time, Governor Perry developed the Trans-Texas Corridor plan.But is it something Perry really wants broadcast as an achievement?

The Texas Republican Partys 2010 platform includes a plank specifically opposing the Trans-Texas Corridor. Some of the opposition to the NAFTA Superhighway has been dismissed as conspiratorial, but loud objections also came from people concerned with border security and one million rural interests and farmers that stood to lose their land to eminent domain....... more at townhall.com

As Americans continue to struggle with the loss of their homes, savings and retirement resources, thieving/opportunistic politicans that were complicit in deregulating govt sponsored enterprises (GSEs) in the secondary market----namely Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac---that caused the subprime loan bomb to detonate---are still jockeying for power.

BACKSTORY In 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed Andrew Cuomo to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as Assistant Secretary.In 1997 Cuomo took over as HUD chief replacing Clinton appointee Henry Cisneros. Latino Cisneros tenure championed Clinton's goal of social engineering via the housing market forcing lenders to issue loans to those that would not financially qualify for standard-laden lending.

Cisneros left office in a scandal involving lying to the FBI over payouts to a mistress, Cisneros subsequently pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and though never sent to prison received a pardon from Bill Clinton in 2001.

Andrew Cuomo took the HUD reins and not only furthered Cisneros and Clinton's policies but greatly expanded them.

Henry Cisneros moved the GSEs toward a requirement that 42 percent of their mortgages serve low and moderate income families. Andrew Cuomo raised that number to 50 percent and dramatically hiked GSE mandates to buy mortgages for the "very- low-income."

These bad loans were purchased and sold throughout the secondary market and the pyramid grew and the bottom collapsed resulting in the subprime crisis we are still reeling from today.c

In 2008, the Village Voice published a compelling report detailing Andrew Cuomo's policy decisions "that gave birth to the country's current crisis."

The report touched on how Cuomo's 187-page rules "opened the door to abuse." The rules explicitly rejected the idea of imposing any new reporting requirements on the GSEs. In other words, HUD wanted Fannie and Freddie to buy risky loans, but the department didn't want to hear just how risky they were.

Many New York voters are failing to see the actual harm to the minority community directly caused by Cuomo's policies...matter.

Cuomo's top HUD aide said, "We believe that there are a lot of loans to black Americans that could be safely purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if these companies were more flexible."

Andrew Cuomo doubled down and had this to say about his HUD standards, "GSE presence in the subprime market could be of significant benefit to lower-income families, minorities, and families living in underserved areas."

How's that working out for the minority community, where foreclosures and unemployment rates have hit the hardest as a result of such failed policies and blatant social engineering?

EXCLUSIVE The dating life of Assemblywoman Naomi Rivera (ousted from office by voters) has shed light on a web of Latino nonprofits in The Bronx  groups that benefit a close-knit network of political insiders as much as the community.

Rivera installed a boyfriend, Vincent Pinela, as head of the Bronx Council for Economic Development, a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he admits being unqualified to run. He alleges she used the group to fund their dates and her campaign.

But the Bronx economic council is only one nonprofit of many organized under the Hispanic Federation, which has taken in $24 million in taxpayer money since 1998. The federation has ties to almost every Hispanic lawmaker in The Bronx, including Rivera, but primarily benefits two men: political strategist Luis Miranda, who co-founded it and once served as its president, and Roberto Ramirez, a former Bronx Democratic Party boss. The men run a private political consulting firm, the MirRam Group. Its paid by the Hispanic Federation and is hired by politicians who steer taxpayer money to the nonprofit.

A NY Post investigation has found:

<><><>* The Hispanic Federation paid MirRam and Miranda Towns, a firm registered to Miranda and his wife, $681,644 between 1999 and 2008 for consulting, records show.

<><><>* In 2005, the federation paid MirRam $88,000 to survey Latinos on topics including the mayors race. At the same time, MirRam was paid $1.37 million by Fernando Ferrer, then a mayoral candidate.

<><><>* Ramirez and Miranda gave political allies jobs at the nonprofit. Ex-Secretary of State Lorraine Cortez Vazquez, who had been Ramirezs chief of staff, made more than $180,000 a year there.

<><><>* The Hispanic Federation paid MirRam $33,000 this year to lobby the City Council, records show.

<><><>* The group often pays out small amounts, from $400 to $800, to individuals without detailing why on official documents as required by law. A source in the group said these are sometimes payments for favor. "I have to pay a lady who is bringing latino seniors to a political event, the source said. They promised to send the lady to the Dominican Republic with her family in exchange for rounding up votes. An Hispanic Federation spokesman lied---and said the payments were for families of victims of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in Queens in 2001, or "other people in need."

Miranda launched the Hispanic Federation in 1990, the year Ramirez won an Assembly seat in Fordham. Ramirez left politics in 2000 and handed the party reins to Assemblyman José Rivera, father of sexpot Naomi, in 2002. Insiders say that if you want influence in The Bronx, you have to deal with the Hispanic Federation and, by extension, MirRam consultants. Nonprofits, for instance, pay the Hispanic Federation to do their bookkeeping.

Rivera's Bronx Economic Development council was charged $12,000 a year for Hispanic Federation services according toher boytoy Pinela. Every year, the federation throws a fund-raising gala packed with politicians---a bash at the Waldorf-Astoria last Apri1 brought out mayoral hopefuls City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Bill Thompson and New York Giant Victor Cruz.

But the blurring of a nonprofit and a consultant group means theres little or no accountability, said the source inside the Hispanic Federation. If we were helping the Little League around the corner to get bats or gloves . . . the ends justify the means, the source said. But when you are giving extra money to a senior center because they delivered people to a [political] event, its a different story.

A federation spokesman called the allegations simply untrue, saying it only provides funds for those in need of disaster relief. As for payments to MirRam, the group noted that Miranda was no longer its president and MirRam is arguably the top Latino lobbying and strategic consulting firm in our city.

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